While Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is just around the corner, Microsoft has failed to meet the exact deadline for the delivery of the second development milestone for the successor of IE7. By the end of August 2008, testers will have the pleasure of playing around with IE8 Beta 2, according to the Redmond company which managed to not reveal any additional details. Beta 2, unlike the first release dropped in March, will be consumer-oriented, as opposed to developer-centric. Beta 1 was focused on web content developers and designers in an effort to get the World Wide Web ready for IE8's new default standards compliant mode and fresh set of features.

Getting web content ready for IE8 works perfectly in conjunction with acquiring deep knowledge about the new features, capabilities and standards support that the browser brings to the table. In this regard, in addition to the IE8 Readiness Toolkit, Microsoft has also made available for download the Tech-Ed 2008 Hands-on Labs: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers.

"These labs cover the following topics: IE 8 Activities; AJAX; Developer Tools; Standards Support; IE 8 WebSlices. These labs assume you are running Windows Vista. They will work on Windows XP but the visual experience and instructions may vary," revealed a Microsoft ASP.NET Debugging engineer.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 indicates a consistent evolution compared to Beta 1, but the new development milestone is designed to complete the feature set of the browser. Microsoft is currently targeting a final release to web date sometime by the end of 2008. In this regard, the Beta testing stage will not continue to stretch much further, even though the software giant indicated that user feedback will ultimately dictate when the gold version of the browser will ship.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 can be downloaded from here.